“It’s a deal,” said George, excitedly, and he would have closed with Mr Higgin then and there, but his sister-in-law came downstairs at that moment, greeted Mr Higgin formally, and sat down again to her paper, pencil in hand.
“What do you think, Ede,” said George. “Mr Higgin is going to give me a little training in a few little take-offs and sketches. Get a little new material.”
“Your brother-in-law and sister have talent, I feel,” said Mr Higgin. “One develops an instinct for such things. And you, too, Mrs Little; I feel that you are by no means the least talented of this gifted family. But your flair is for the serious rather than the comic. You and your sister might pose for a study of Comedy and Tragedy. You know the famous portrait of Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy? What a tableau you might make, with you, Mr Morphew, as Garrick, of course.”
“Never heard of Garrick, but I’m strong on garlic,” roared George. He was one of those men to whom onions, in all forms, were exquisitely comic.
“Oh, Mr Morphew, what an impromptu!” cried Mr Higgin, tee-heeing until his face was a deep carrot colour. “What a radio MC you might make! Or television!” Mr Higgin waved a tiny hand, as though indicating boundless vistas of achievement before George. But George was not the only one who had fallen under his spell.
“Funny you should compare Kitten and I with Comedy and Tragedy,” said Edith, “because that’s the way our lives have always worked out. Hers is a great big joke, all the time, but I’ve always seemed to get the dirty end of the stick.”
“Aw now, Ede, it’s not as bad as that,” said Kitten.
“That’s how it seems to you,” said Edith, “but you haven’t gone through what I’ve gone through.”
“Husband ran out on her,” said George, who had no sense of artistic form and did not understand that such a revelation as this should have come after much preliminary hinting. “Left her with the kid.”
“Left her before the baby came,” said Kitten. “What I said at the time was, how big of a stinker can a fella get?”
Mr Higgin said nothing, but he looked at Edith very seriously, his mouth so pursed as to be completely circular. At last he said, “Perhaps you were well rid of him.”
“I was,” said Edith, who was enjoying the situation. “But if there’s one thing means more to me than anything else, it’s duty, and he’s got a duty to little Earl, and the dearest wish of my life is to see that duty done.”
“Yes?” said Mr Higgin, for that seemed to be what was wanted of him. But once again George clumsily robbed Edith of her moment.
“Wants to catch up with him,” said he, “to dig money out of him for the kid’s education. But no luck, so far.”
“Your boy will bless you for it,” said Mr Higgin, turning his eyes solemnly upon Edith. “A parent cannot give a child anything finer than an education to fit it for life. As I was suggesting a few moments ago to Mrs Morphew, I might perhaps undertake the little lad’s speech-training; a really well-trained voice, from his earliest years, would put him far beyond ordinary children, who speak very carelessly in Canada, I must say. And in such a talented family—”
“No, Ede, don’t you do anything that’ll make the kid talk different from other kids,” said George. “A kid’s got to be regular. Other kids hate a stuck-up kid. If a kid isn’t just like other kids it keeps him from getting to be outstanding, and going ahead in the world. Nope, I won’t go for any teaching the kid to speak like a sissy.”
“And what’s it got to do with you?” said Edith coldly.
“The kid’s got no father and I feel a kind of a duty to give the advice a father’d give. You want the kid to grow up regular, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure I want him to grow up to travel in canned goods,” said Edith.
“Oh, and what’s wrong with travelling in canned goods? Just as good as being a house-painter, I’d say.”
“Earl’s father was a sign-painter and letterer,” said Edith haughtily.
“And you have found no trace of him?” said Mr Higgin, who wanted to steer the conversation into calmer waters.
“Not hide nor hair,” said Kitten, and added portentously, “and from that day to this Ede has lived without men. Bob Little was the first and the last.”
“Oh, not the last, I’m sure,” said Mr Higgin gallantly. “He will be presumed dead, after a time, and then I am sure that you will have suitors galore. Galore,” he repeated, savouring this fine word.
“A widda with a kid isn’t going to draw much of a crowd,” said George, with more gloom than seemed really necessary.
“Oh, I must contradict you,” said Mr Higgin, tee-heeing. “A widow is a very attractive creature,” and he began to sing softly:
Have you heard of the widow Malone?
Ochone!
Who was bred in the town of Athlone?
Alone!
Och, she bothered the hearts
Of the swains in them parts.
So lovely the Widow Malone
Ochone!
So lovely the widow Malone!
This outburst was so surprising that no one offered to speak immediately after it, and Mr Higgin followed up his advantage.
“Not only a rare melancholy beauty, but also literary taste and intellect, Mrs Little,” and with his hand he indicated the newspaper and the pencil which she was holding.
“Oh, that,” said Edith, blushing for no reason that she could think of. “Oh, that’s just a hobby of mine; every night I go through and mark the mistakes.”
“Ede keeps house for the editor,” said George. “Fella by the name of Ridley.”
“Mr Gloster Ridley,” said Edith primly. “I oblige him as a daily homemaker.”
“Washes the dishes after he cooks,” sniggered George. “Cooks all his own meals. Wears an apron too, I bet. That’s what happens to kids that aren’t regular.”
“Mr Gloster Ridley?” said Mr Higgin. “And you mark errors in the paper for him. Do you find many?”
“Not really for him,” said Edith. “But I feel I ought to help all I can. I can’t say he’s very grateful. In fact, I don’t mention it very often; I just take my marked paper and leave it where he’ll see it. Usually he doesn’t look.”
“How interesting. What kind of errors do you find?”
“All kinds. Names reversed under pictures, and misprints, and that kind of thing. Like this—” She pointed to a mark she had made on the social page. “See here, in this report of the Catholic Women’s League tea, it says: “The table was centred with a mass of dwarf nuns.” Of course, that ought to read ‘dwarf mums’.” “Mums? Mothers, do you mean?”
“No. Chrysanthemums. He’ll be sore when he sees that. But I won’t be the one to point it out. Sometimes he’s as good as hinted that he’d as soon I didn’t mark the paper.”
“Ah, touchy?”
“Very touchy. Yesterday there was a wrong date in an engagement notice. Said a marriage would take place on November 31st. What do you think of that?”
“I think some poor guy is probably making the mistake of his life,” said George, winking at Kitten, who punched him affectionately.
“I wouldn’t mention it to him. He marks a paper himself, and I just happened to see it this morning, before he went to work, and he hadn’t caught it. There’ll be trouble about that.”
“I should think so,” said Mr Higgin, his eyes wide. “Was it the engagement of anyone you knew?”
“Not to say I actually know them,” said Edith. “One was the daughter of a professor at the University and the other was Solly Bridgetower. I guess everybody knows about him; a while ago he was chasing after that Griselda Webster, but you wouldn’t catch a rich girl like that marrying a poor wet like him. They said his mother broke it up.”
“Well, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what happened about that,” said Mr Higgin, laughing his little laugh. “If you know this young Bridgetower, you will probably hear all about it.”
“Oh, it isn’t as
if we actually know him,” said Kitten. “But you know how it is; we’ve lived in Salterton all our lives, and we get to know about a lot of people we don’t actually know to speak to, if you understand me.”
“I must speak to my friend Mr Shillito about it,” said Mr Higgin. “He is very highly placed on The Bellman, and he has been most kind to me since I came to town. Indeed, it was he who sent me to see Mr Bridgetower at the University.”
The conversation moved to more immediately interesting matters, such as the latent talent of the Morphews and Mrs Little, the striking cleverness of little Earl, the nobility and fortitude of a grass-widow of thirty-two who brought up her fatherless child single-handed, the desirability of daily home-making as a career over factory work (in that it allowed a refined person to keep herself to herself), the vagaries of life on the road, the art of salesmanship and the toll it took of the salesman, and kindred topics. So congenial did Mr Higgin prove that they sat until twelve o”clock, drinking some beer and eating cheese and crackers. They were greatly surprised to find how late it was, and when Mr Higgin sang as much as one man could of the Midnight Quartet from Flotow’s Martha (an opera in which, he said, he had once toured in Southern Ireland) the Morphews were lifted to such a romantic pitch that they did not observe that Mr Higgin had taken Edith’s hand and was pressing it tenderly to the breast pocket of his shiny blue suit. As Edith undressed in her own room—dark, so that Earl might not wake—she could hear his light tenor voice singing in the boarder’s room, and she reflected that however distant Mr Ridley might be, not all men of cultivation were unmoved by her presence.
Three
In the music room of Waverley University Library, Pearl Vambrace had abandoned herself to a deplorable form of self-indulgence. If Mr Kelso, the lecturer on music, were to find her he would certainly be angry. If Dr Forgie, the Librarian, were to find her he would be angry too, for although he had no ear for music he knew an idle assistant when he saw one. But the chances were good that nobody would find her, for Mr Kelso had cancelled his Music Appreciation Hour for that afternoon, and everybody knew it but Dr Forgie. So Pearl had seized her chance. It had been a hateful day, and it would undoubtedly go on being hateful. She sprawled in a large armchair, her head resting on one arm and her legs dangling over the other, and gave herself up to illicit, healing pleasure.
The phonograph in the Music Room was of the largest and most expensive kind; it would play a great many records without being touched. But it was temperamental, like so many great artists, and only Mr Kelso and Pearl, who acted as his helper during music lectures, were permitted to go near it. Under Mr Kelso’s extremely critical eye Pearl had learned to pick up recordings by their edges only, to wipe them with a chamois, and to place them on the spindle of the costly, fretful machine. She was permitted to act as Mr Kelso’s handmaiden, and as nursemaid to the phonograph, because she had, in her own undergraduate years, been a particularly apt pupil in Music Appreciation; she could appreciate anything, and satisfy Mr Kelso that her appreciation was akin to, though naturally of a lesser intensity than, his own. Play her a Gregorian chant, and she would appreciate it; play her a Bartok quartet and she would appreciate that. And what brought a frosty and unwilling smile to Mr Kelso’s lips was that her appreciation, like his own, was untainted by sentimentalism; she did not rhapsodize foolishly about music, as so many of his students did; she really seemed to understand what music was, and to understand what he said about it in his singularly unmusical voice. When Pearl, the autumn after her graduation, was taken on the Library staff, Mr Kelso had asked that she be allowed to help him in the Music Room, when he lectured there.
It would never occur to Mr Kelso that Pearl was a hypocrite, or that Music Appreciation, as taught by him, was something which a stone-deaf student could learn and pass examinations in. But such was the case, and her post as bottle-washer to Mr Kelso and the machine gave Pearl occasional chances for indulging what she fully knew to be a base side of her nature.
Among the very large collection of phonograph records which the Library maintained were perhaps a hundred which Mr Kelso called his Horrible Examples. These were pieces of music which he despised, sung or played by people whose manner of interpretation he despised. Now and then Mr Kelso would play one of these, in order to warn his students against some damnable musical heresy. It had taken Pearl a long time to recognize and admit to herself that just as there were times when she had to buy and eat a dozen doughnuts in one great sensual burst, there were also times when the Horrible Examples, and nothing else, were the music she wanted to hear.
As she lay in the chair on the afternoon of November 1st, a bag in which there were still ten delicious greasy doughnuts was on the floor at her side, and on the turntable of the phonograph was what she called, to herself, a Vambrace Mixed Concert. At present, in the concert hall of her mind, the world-renowned pianist, Pearl Vambrace, was playing Sinding’s Rustle of Spring; as the cascades of sound gushed and burbled from the instrument the audience asked itself how it was that this frail girl could produce a body of tone which might have been (and in plain fact was) that of two players with a piano each: and the only reply that the audience could give itself was that this was the mastery vouchsafed to an artist who lived wholly for her art… Spring ceased to rustle, the gramophone gave a discreet, expensive cough, and at once broke into the rather thin strains of I’ll Sing Thee Songs of Araby. Pearl Vambrace, the contralto marvel of the age, stood by the piano, singing the sweet ballad with a melancholy beauty which suggested very strongly the voice of a once-great Welsh tenor… To cheat thee of a sigh, or charm thee to a tear… With heartbreaking loveliness, with ineffable, romantic silliness, the exquisite voice mounted to the last note, and Pearl’s eyes were wet as her hand stole down into the bag for another doughnut… This lot of records was nearly done. Only one more to be played. It was Sibelius’ Valse Triste, which Mr Kelso was accustomed to call an aberration of genius, but which Pearl thought of in quite different terms. This time she appeared upon the stage of her imagination as Pearl Vambrace, the great ballerina, floating with pathetic grace through a dance of love and death. It was unbearably beautiful, and yet, somehow, it made life much more bearable. It made it possible, for instance, to think with some composure about Father.
Sherlock Holmes was accustomed to think of a difficult case as a three-pipe problem. In Pearl’s life, Father was becoming more and more a dozen-doughnut problem. Without the greasy, bulky comfort of a dozen doughnuts distributed at various points through her digestive tract the Professor’s daughter found it hard to think about him at all. His behaviour last night, for instance; his terrible rage, his rhetorical ravings after he had finished talking on the telephone with Dean Knapp; it was all that she could do to bring herself to think of them. He had not been so much angry as amazed, to begin with, but gradually, over an hour’s time, he had worked himself up to a pitch of shouting fury. And what a personal fury! Great as his rage was, it was only big enough for himself. She and Mummy might have been the culprits, rather than the sharers in any disgrace or scandal that there was.
Mummy had taken it, as always when there was trouble, incoherently and in tears, and finally in agonized prayer. That Mummy loved Father there was no shadow of doubt, and that Mummy loved God was equally apparent. But she seemed always to be so frightened and guilty before them both. Perhaps if Father had not forbidden Mummy to bring Pearl up a Catholic things would have been easier at home. Pearl knew, of course, that when they had married, Father had promised (but “as good as promised” was the exact phrase that Mummy used on the rare occasions when she spoke of it to Pearl) to join his wife in her faith, but he had refused to do so (or as Mummy always said, “had been unable to do so”). He had insisted that Pearl be brought up an agnostic, like himself. Nor was this done by neglect of religion, or silence about it; long before she could understand what he was talking about Father had lectured her on the nature of faith, of which he had a poor opinion. And as Mummy became more
and more devout, and gave more and more of her time to meditation and spiritual exercises, Father’s unbelief grew rawer and more aggressive. Home was not easy. But Pearl was a loyal daughter and it never occurred to her that home was, in many ways, a hell.
Last night Mummy had spent at least two hours at the prie-dieu in her bedroom, weeping softly and praying. Pearl had no such refuge. Father had paced the floor, his eyes glaring, and at one time foam, unmistakable foam, had appeared at the corners of his mouth. He had talked of a plot, on the part of a considerable number of unknown persons, to bring him into disrepute and mockery. He had been darkly conscious of this plot for some time; indeed, it had begun before he had been done out of his rightful dignity as Dean of Arts. That was when the late Professor Bridgetower had been voted into the dean’s chair. Bridgetower! A scientist, a geologist if you please, who would not even have been in the Arts faculty if the composition of the Waverley syllabus had not been ridiculously out of date! What if the man was called Professor of Natural Philosophy; in the present day such terminology was as ludicrous as calling a man Professor of Phrenology. They had been out to defeat him and they had done so. But, not content with that shabby triumph, they now sought to disgrace him through his family. Through his only child—a daughter! What would they have contrived, the Professor demanded of the world at large, if he had had a son?
The first part of the Vambrace Mixed Concert had come to an end, and Pearl rose to put a new pile of records on the turntable. But that which was uppermost in the group she had chosen was a violin rendition of The Londonderry Air, and she felt suddenly that she could not bear anything Irish, however good it might be. So she put on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Number Six, and in no time, in that vast imaginary concert hall, the great woman conductor, Pearl Vambrace, was letting an enchanted audience hear how unbearably pathetic the Pathétique could be.
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